ABSTRACT

PREVENTIVE WARS, JUST WAR PRINCIPLES, AND THE UNITED NATIONS

In a recent report to the Security Council, Kofi Annan stated that, "Since assuming office, I have pledged to move the United Nations from a culture of reaction to a culture of prevention." In broad agreement with his report, this paper explores a question that he does not consider sufficiently: should a UN culture of prevention include an option of preventive military actions? Correlatively, it explores the question: could UN preventive military actions satisfy just war principles? Rather than from the standpoint of the individual nation state, the ethics of preventive war is discussed from the standpoint of the United Nations. For the sake of brevity, only the legitimate authority, just cause, last resort, and proportionality principles are considered. Since there has been disagreement within the just war tradition about the specific content of these principles, a third question also is explored: how should they be formulated? Moreover, these questions are addressed in the context of a particular issue: the goals of the nonproliferation and the abolition of weapons of mass destruction.